I scanned the search results again. There were several Wendell Bronsons, but none was my therapist. I kept looking, and two pages in, I noticed a Yelp listing for Wendell. It had one review. I clicked.
The reviewer, who went by the name Angela L., had been named an “elite” reviewer for five years in a row, and no wonder. She had posted about restaurants, dry cleaners, mattress warehouses, dog parks, dentists (a revolving door of them), gynecologists, manicurists, roofers, florists, clothing stores, hotels, pest-control companies, movers, pharmacies, car dealers, tattoo parlors, a personal injury lawyer, and even a criminal defense attorney (something about being “falsely accused” of a parking violation, which had somehow become a criminal offense).
But most striking about Angela L. wasn’t the sheer number of reviews; it was how aggressively negative nearly all of them were.
FAIL! she’d write. Or DUMBASSES! Angela L. seemed to be horribly disappointed with everything. The way her cuticles were cut. The way a receptionist spoke to her. Even when she was on vacation, nothing escaped her scrutiny. She’d post reviews while at the rental-car booth, at the hotel check-in, upon arrival in her room, in seemingly every place she ate and drank during her trip, and even out at the beach (where she’d once stepped on a rock in what was supposed to be silky white sand and claimed that it had injured her foot). Invariably, everyone she encountered was lazy or incompetent or stupid.
She reminded me of John. And then it occurred to me that maybe Angela L. was Margo! Because the one person in the world that Angela L. didn’t feel pissed off at or treated unfairly by was Wendell.
He got Angela L.’s very first five-star review.
I’ve been to many therapists—no surprise there—but this time I feel like I’m making real strides, she wrote. She went on to gush about Wendell’s compassion and wisdom, adding that he was helping her to see how her behaviors were contributing to her marital difficulties. Because of Wendell, she added, she had been able to reconcile with her husband after they’d separated. (So not Margo.)
The review had been posted a year ago. Scanning her subsequent entries, I noticed a trend. Gradually, her string of one- and two-star pans became three- and then four-star praise. Angela L. was becoming less angry at the world, less prone to blaming others for her unhappiness (what we call externalizing). There was less raging at customer-service reps, fewer perceived slights (personalization), more self-awareness (acknowledging, in one review, that she could be difficult to please). The quantity of posts had dropped off too, making the endeavor seem less obsessive. She was approaching “emotional sobriety”—the ability to regulate one’s feelings without self-medicating, whether that medication comes in the form of substances, defenses, affairs, or the internet.
Kudos to Wendell, I thought. I could see Angela L.’s emotional evolution through the progression of her Yelp reviews.
But just as I was admiring Wendell’s skill, I came across another irate one-star review from Angela L. It was for a shuttle service, a downgrade from an earlier four-star review she’d given the company. Angela L. seemed livid that the bus played loud Muzak and the driver couldn’t turn it off. How could they “attack” riders like this? Three paragraphs later, punctuated by multiple ALL CAPS and exclamation marks, Angela L. ended the review with I’ve used this company for months, but no more. Our relationship is over!!!
Her dramatic breakup with the shuttle service after all those more balanced reviews might have been expected. Like many people, she’d probably backslid, regretted it, realized she’d hit bottom, and decided that moderation wasn’t enough; she had to quit Yelp entirely. And so far she had—that had been Angela L.’s final review, posted six months ago.
But I wasn’t ready to quit my Google-stalking. Half an hour later, my cursor hovered over the interview with Wendell’s mother. The therapist I knew seemed both grounded and unconventional, tough and gentle, confident and awkward. Who had raised him? I felt like I’d found the mother lode—so to speak.
Of course, I clicked.
The Q&A, which turned out to be a ten-page family history, appeared on the blog of a local organization that was documenting the lives of notable families who had lived in that Midwestern town for half a century.
Both of Wendell’s parents, I learned, had grown up poor. His maternal grandmother died in childbirth, so his mom went to live with her father’s sister in a small apartment, and their family became hers. Wendell’s father, meanwhile, had become a self-made man, the first in his family to go to college. It was at this large state university that he met Wendell’s mother, the first woman in her family to get a college degree. After they married, he started a business, she gave birth to a brood of five, and by the time Wendell was a teenager, the family had become spectacularly wealthy—one of the reasons for the interview I was reading. Apparently, Wendell’s parents gave away much of their wealth to charitable causes.
By the time I got to the names of Wendell’s siblings and their spouses and children, I had become as unhinged as Angela L. I researched Wendell’s entire family—what they did for a living, what cities they were in, how old their kids were, who was divorced. None of this was easy to find; my mission involved extensive cross-referencing and hours of time.
Admittedly, I knew a few things about Wendell from comments he’d strategically dropped into our sessions. Once, after I said, “But it’s not fair!” about the Boyfriend situation, Wendell looked at me and replied, kindly, “You sound like my ten-year-old. What makes you think life is supposed to be fair?”
I took in his point, but I also thought, Oh, he has a kid around my son’s age. When he tossed me these morsels, they felt like unexpected gifts.
But that night on the internet, there was always another lead, another link. He’d met his wife through a mutual friend; his family lived in a Spanish-style house that, according to Zillow, had doubled in value since they’d bought it; recently, when he’d needed to reschedule our appointment, it was because he was presenting at a conference.
By the time I finally shut down my laptop, the night was over and I felt guilty, empty, and exhausted.
The internet can be both a salve and an addiction, a way to block out pain (the salve) while simultaneously creating it (the addiction). When the cyber-drug wears off, you feel worse, not better. Patients think they want to know about their therapists, but often, once they find out, they wish they hadn’t, because this knowledge has the potential to contaminate the relationship, leaving patients to edit, consciously or not, what they say in their sessions.
I knew that what I’d done had been destructive. And I also knew that I wouldn’t tell Wendell about it. I understood why, when a patient inadvertently reveals knowing more about me than I’ve shared and I ask about it, there’s a slight hesitation while the person decides whether to be honest or lie. It’s hard to confess to stalking your therapist. I was ashamed—of invading Wendell’s privacy, of wasting away the evening—and I vowed (perhaps like Angela L.) never to do it again.
Still, the damage had been done. When I went back to Wendell the following Wednesday, I felt weighed down by my newfound knowledge. I couldn’t help thinking that it was only a matter of time before I’d slip up—just like my own patients did.